The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the latest flagship chipset for the next generation of Android smartphones, following a lengthy leak campaign. Qualcomm’s ARM-based X Elite laptop chips have a unified naming scheme, as you might have guessed.
As with Snapdragon laptop chips, the 8 Elite has an Oryon CPU with a custom eight-core structure with 2x prime cores and 6x performance units clocked up to 3.53 GHz. Moreover, the system supports 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM and a 24-MB L2 cache.
It boasts 45% higher CPU performance and 44% improved power efficiency over its predecessor, produced on TSMC’s 3nm process. Qualcomm’s revamped Adreno GPU features 40% more performance and power savings, along with improved ray-tracing. Besides supporting Unreal Engine 5.3, Qualcomm’s new chips also support Nanite virtualized geometry.
AI tasks run 45% faster with improved performance per watt thanks to the new Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). Qualcomm is bringing multimodal Gen AI support to its AI Engine. On SLMs, large and small multimodal models can run up to 70 tokens each.
Hexagon NPU is further integrated with Snapdragon 8 Elite’s enhanced image signal processing (ISP). The HDR is better, the skin tone is more natural-looking, the sky colours are more vibrant, and the autofocus performance is improved. The chip-level semantic segmentation and video object erasers have also been added by Qualcomm.
Connectivity:
On the connectivity front, Snapdragon 8 Elite features the Snapdragon X80 5G modem, which is the first 5G modem with 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension. According to Qualcomm, peak download speeds are rated at 10 Gbps, with theoretical upload speeds of 3.5 Gbps.
Combined with the modem is the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, which is the world’s first to combine Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra Wideband connectivity.
Many of the upcoming flagship Android smartphones from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi, and others will be powered by Snapdragon 8 Elite.
